Red Smith Hard Times Beside the Potomac

WASHINGTON, Nov. 21—So Dallas, which replaced Washington in the American League late in the baseball season, now has taken this beleaguered city's spot at the head of the National Football Conference's Eastern Di vision. Except for five heavenly Sundays when the Red skins won ‘em all, this has been an autumn to try the souls of the most sanguine of the capital's sports fans, even including that incurable buff who lives at 1600 Pennsyl vania Avenue. (Indeed, some authorities predict that things don't get better and Phase Two doesn't work, he'll leave Henry Kissinger to mind the store and go get a job on the LBJ Ranch.)

Sports of The Times

This was going to be the Redskins’ greatest ‘year since Sammy Baugh pitched them to a division title in 1945, but a funny thing hap pened to them on the way to the Super Bowl.

Undefeated and practically immortal on Oct. 24, they took a lead of 17‐6 over Kansas City in the first half but at the same time lost Jerry Smith and Charlie Taylor with injuries. Taylor, their best wide receiver, and Smith, the “gut” man at tight end who got them the touchdowns they needed most, had both won all‐pro distinctions.

Without these two, the Skins managed to lose that Kansas City game, and they haven't beaten anybody since except, New Orleans, the most soft‐bitten team in the N.F.C. Western Division. Washington hasn't scored a touchdown in eight periods of play, and today's 13‐0 shut out by Dallas made it four lost weekends out of five.

Until their dream of empire began to turn brown around the edges, the Redskins were regarded as geriatric wonders whose inspiring example was doing more for the aged than Medicare. George Allen, a coach who is addicted to clichés as some men are addicted to the bottle, refers his players affectionately as “my old geezers,” because Jack Pardee is 35, Boyd Dowler and Rich Petitbon 33 and Bill Kilmer 31.

However, the average age of today's starting eleven was only 28.18 years, and that may have been the Skins’ downfall. These callow youths were no match for the Old Salt who engineered their defeat, Roger Staubach, a retired naval officer of 29.

Roger was a submariner after he got out of Annapolis and a sub quarterback after that. After the Cowboys had brought off the remarkable coup of losing to the Redskins, the New Orleans Saints and the Chicago Bears with Stau bach and Craig Morton alternating at quarterback, Tom Landry reluctantly installed the Old Tar as the regular.

He was reluctant because Staubach is a scrambler, and Landry considers it a crime against nature for the quarter back to run with the ball. “When a quarterback keeps running,” the coach says, “eventually he's gonna get hurt.” Furthermore, he contends, on most of the 27 times Stau bach ran this season, there was an eligible pass‐receiver open.

Well, Roger ran five times today, scampered 29 yards for the game's only touchdown and wound up with 49 yards. That was only 5 yards less than Washington's two best rushers, Larry Brown and Charlie Harraway, gained between them. Roger's average of 9.8 yards a carry far excelled that of the game's busiest battlewagon, Duane Thomas. Thomas made 53 yards but had to carry the ball 20 times to achieve that figure.

The Dean

Perhaps the most charming aspect of Staubach's touchdown run was the fact that it was aided, perhaps made possible, by a friendly real estate salesman who had not played for keeps since Super Bowl V last January.

This character is Tony Liscio, an offensive tackle whom Dallas traded to San Diego last winter, and who quit when San Diego consigned him to Miami. Last Tues day the Cowboys, having lost three offensive tackles the medical profession, plucked him out of a Dallas realtor's office.

With the Cowboys on Washington's 29‐yard line the first quarter today, Liscio blocked huge Verlon Biggs away from Staubach and held the block tenaciously while Roger ran on a long slant to the end zone.

Mike Clark, another soul snatched from limbo after losing his job to a small Hungarian soccer player named Toni Fritsch, got the Cowboys’ other points with a con version kick and two field goals. After his second goal made the score 13‐0 early in the second half, the crowd started screaming for Christian Adolph Jurgensen, 37‐year‐old dean of Allen's old geezers.

Jurgensen was hurt before the season started and Bill Kilmer was the quarterback who steered Washington six victories. “But,” the fans were asking, “what has he done for us lately?” They booed him warmly,_ and when Sonny Jurgensen got off the bench and started warming up—he wore a windbreaker that couldn't have concealed his paunch better if it had been made by Lane Bryant—they screamed with joy.

The clock showed 13 minutes 25 seconds to play when Jurgy went in. He threw 16 passes, completed nine, ran once for 11 yards, and contributed nothing whatever the score. Every pot‐bellied old gentleman looking on felt bad about it.

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A version of this archives appears in print on November 22, 1971, on Page 55 of the New York edition with the headline: Red Smith Hard Times Beside the Potomac. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe